Biography
Barbara Stanelli Thomas leads Vapi's EMEA business, building the company's European presence as voice AI moves from developer experiment to enterprise deployment. She brings over a decade in enterprise software sales, including closing Vapi's largest new EMEA logo, and studied at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona.
She works where technical capability meets commercial reality: what enterprise buyers in healthcare, retail and financial services actually need before they will put an AI agent on a customer call, how European buying cycles and developer communities differ from those in the US, and why so many voice projects stall between pilot and production.
Her perspective is especially relevant for audiences interested in enterprise AI adoption, voice agents in customer-facing operations, and how AI companies build a European market from the ground up.
Session
- AI For TechSpeaker
Workshop 4: Give Your Product a Voice — Build a Live AI Voice Agent in 60 Minutes
Tuesday 22 September, 11:30 – 12:50Workshop Room BEveryone's talking about voice AI. In this room, you'll actually ship one. Roshan and Barbara will get you from a blank screen to a working, talking AI agent that can hold a real phone conversation, before the coffee break ends. You'll design its personality, wire up its brain (LLM), give it ears and a mouth (speech-to-text and text-to-speech), and connect it to a real tool so it does more than chat, it acts. Bring a laptop and an idea. Leave with a deployed agent, a live phone number, and the know-how to build the next one yourself. What you'll walk away with: • A working voice agent you built yourself, live • A mental model for the voice AI stack (STT → LLM → TTS → tools) and where the real engineering challenges hide (latency, interruption handling, tool-calling reliability) • The gap between a slick demo and something that survives a real caller — the practical lessons Vapi's forward-deployed engineers see across production deployments Best for: builders, PMs, and founders who want to stop reading about voice AI and start shipping it. No ML background required — bring curiosity and a laptop.
With Roshan Manjaly